Wear and Read

 

 

|  My sister made me a corset. It is a thing of beauty and I can see it being part of my "uniform" when working from home, to make me sit up that bit straighter and feel more able and in control. I realise the historical connotations would be rather the opposite. But I find it does wonders for one's breathing if you don't make it so tight it squashes all your vital organs. Her online shop is here, but will be transferred to another site when she leaves Germany.

|  I am much more of a baker than a cook, so I want to learn more about cooking. The Flavour Thesaurus is not only a great resource, explaining what goes with what and why, but also entertaining (sample: "If you ever feel a bit decadent tucking into bacon and eggs at breakfast, it may help to know that in pre-revolutionary Russia the Tsar's children started the day with a dish of mashed banana and caviar.") and a beautiful book.

|  The older I get the shorter my hemlines, it seems. For a good part of my teenage years I wore long floaty skirts; in my early twenties a much older boyfriend described my mid-length skirts as "granny-style"; and now I can often be seen in 1960s minidresses and shorts, including these yellow dotty ones.

|  Stag's Leap, Sharon Olds's book of poems about the break-up of her marriage, is a revelation, haunting and powerful, and deservedly won the T.S. Eliot Prize.

[All of the above are presents given to me by real people in my life, not blog freebies!]

Changes

Sibylle looking out at the sea wearing my shaggy black sheep/jumper

Whenever my family visit I am surprised by how easily I switch to house-full-of-people mode. This time there were three of us, which tends to be the maximum in my house, but considering it is is a tiny house that sleeps only three, it does feel full. My younger sister and her husband came over for my 30th birthday, and now they are gone the house seems big and empty.

I slept in the single bed in the spare room while they were here, and even though it lacks the plush bedding of my double bed and fails most feng shui criteria (facing a door, in the wrong direction, and I store artwork under it - under my own bed there is only glorious free space), I always sleep like a baby in that bed. Perhaps it's the knowledge that there are people I love in the room beside me.

I am looking forward to more family time in the summer when I go home for a few weeks, and my older sister and her (Irish) husband are moving here next month, something that still hasn't registered as reality - I will have family here! A friend said that it would change me (it certainly will be a huge change for my sister and brother-in-law), alleviate the inevitable feeling of displacement that comes with living in another country away from one's tribe. Or maybe my sister and I will just miss the rest of the family more.

Our younger sister wrote this, and it is heart-breaking for me to read, despite her positivity [I stole your post title, Sibylle!]. The three-sisters constellation is a special one. And then there is our mother. When I moved here aged 19 it was all an adventure - there were tears shed in the airport, on both sides, and I felt raw at times, but I knew it was what I wanted. This place still is where I want to be, but it doesn't get easier as you get older; rather the opposite, even if I don't always cry when saying goodbye again. I wish geographical obstacles weren't as pronounced as they are.

Lightness

I just saw that Angeliki wrote about Bibliosophy, or How Reading is Connected with Psychology this week, and it struck me that I often get the sense that I have intuitively picked the right book at the right time (or I construe this narrative in hindsight).

Right now, I am re-reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being - curiously at a time when everything feels strangely heavy - and the philosophising in it addresses so much that feels acute to me at the moment:

 "We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come." (p.7, faber and faber, London 1999)

Oliver Burkeman also touched on this in one of his Guardian columns recently. The need to make decisions (not the big life decisions Burkeman talks about, but decisions nonetheless) weighs on me, and I crave lightness, but I have a feeling I will resort to going with the flow as usual. While I find it difficult to trust my intuition, because often I am not even able to access it, I do trust that everything is happening as it should, and perhaps with all the growing going on around me (spring is here at last) and the longer days, the lightness will come, too.

Shock of recognition

 In the garden, April 2013

"There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives.
   Those who are lucky enough to find it, ease like water over a stone, on to its fluid contours, and are home. 
   Some find it in the place of their birth; others may leave a seaside town, parched, and find themselves refreshed in the desert. There are those born in rolling countryside who are really only at ease in the intense and busy loneliness of the city.
   For some, the search is for the imprint of another; a child or a mother, a grandfather or a brother, a lover, a husband, a wife, or a foe. 
   We may go through our lives happy or unhappy, successful or unfulfilled, loved or unloved, without ever standing cold with the shock of recognition, without ever feeling the agony as the twisted iron in our soul unlocks itself, and we slip at last into place."


The above is the first page of Damage by Josephine Hart. I started reading it on the University Park & Ride bus going to work. Part of me wishes I had picked a more dramatic backdrop, as I will always remember where I was when I read something that hit me like these words did, but then again it doesn't matter, and maybe the experience needed the contrast of mundane surroundings.

I won't write more about it here; my posts about books tend to simply be recommendations and a way to remember and archive excerpts and quotes, not reviews with summaries (incidentally, this week Gretchen Rubin explained why she won't describe the books she recommends - I don't necessarily agree, but I get what she means), but here is what Ted Hughes, who always found the right words, had to say about this book:

"Damage is really a poem. The peculiar passion in it evoked by the characters. It is too much for them. It comes from somewhere else like the passion in certain singers that hi-jacks the song. Lorca says somewhere that 'the poem that pierces the heart like a knife has yet to be written', but I felt that kind of knife dangling somewhere in Damage."

And I think the opening sentence deserves inclusion in those lists of 100 Best First Sentences in Literature.

To Do

To Do (for pleasure; I won't go into my countless other To Do lists):

- Read all the books I currently have by my bedside, so I can start reading Damage (actually, I might not wait): this is one of the books that had been on my To Read list for years, and somehow I never saw it anywhere and always forgot when I ordered books online, which is less than once a year as I prefer buying books in real shops. Then, on Saturday, while waiting for a friend I popped into Bell, Book and Candle, a second-hand book and record shop, and there it was.

- More reading. F. Scott Fitzgerald's novels are among my favourite and I have long been fascinated by Zelda Fitzgerald's part in his life and work as well as herself in her own right. My sister gave me the novel Alabama Song a few years ago and I have Nancy Milford's biography, and now, with the new The Great Gatsby film approaching, there are various fiction and non-fiction books being published this year, among them Beautiful Fools by R Clifton Spargo. Everything seems to be Gatsby-themed at the moment, and as someone who loves flapper dresses and ornate headbands, I don't get tired of it, but I have a feeling that despite the abundance of choice at present the flapper dress I have been searching for for so long won't be from a high-street shop. It will be vintage or made by one of my sisters. Or remain a sublime idea.

- Go to the cinema (a rare occurrence for me). I have been meaning to go and see In the House, but the screenings at the cinema here always seem to clash with my teaching or other things, but hopefully I will make it this week. I loved Ozon's Swimming Pool, and until a few weeks ago I didn't know about 2007's Angel, but apparently In the House completes his three-part exploration of the theme of writing.

- Get some sunlight (this - see last photo- is from a lovely book I picked up in a Hippie shop and often dip into for inspiration called 365 Ways to Live a Simple and Spiritual Life by Madonna Gauding. Each entry is preceded by a quote.) I have done that quite a bit over the last few days, which has prompted me to look for a good natural SPF moisturiser. The ones I have used in the past were either too sticky and/or chalky-looking. So far my research has told me that it may be better to use a separate SPF that sits on top of the moisturiser instead of using a combined product. This and this sound good, but I haven't figured out whether I can get them here or if they ship to Ireland. I use jojoba oil as a moisturiser, which is a natural sunscreen, but I worry that it is not sufficient. Lavender and chamomile essential oils also have sun-blocking properties, so mixing those with jojoba as a base oil could be a solution, but again I am not sure how much they protect the skin. Of course I will also go without every now and again to get the full benefit of sunlight. If you have any recommendations for sunscreen, please share in the comments.


| I intend not to use or link to amazon anymore due to their ethically questionable world-domination strategies. And none of the links on my blog are affiliate links.

|| The juxtaposition of the title of this post and the title of the book in the first picture just struck me - no, I do not intend to do damage...

Art in fiction

I posted the following on my other blog a few days ago - that blog is about all things art-related, but since I also write about art here, there are often overlaps in terms of topics, and very occasionally a post will appear on both blogs. So apologies if you have already read this.


I love when a writer is able to successfully conjure up the world of a fictional artist, down to imagining and describing their oeuvre. Siri Hustvedt is excellent at this - she does it in all of her novels, if I remember correctly, and part of me wishes someone had actually created all this work, though it is very likely that its manifestation would not live up to the shape it has taken on in the reader's mind. Perhaps the magic lies in the fact that it doesn't exist beyond the page. From the eerie portrait in The Blindfold  to the embroideries featuring taboo subjects made by an old woman in The Summer without Men, these are pieces that reside in my memory alongside all the actual visual art I have absorbed. Another author who evokes and details the artistic output of her protagonists is Deirdre Madden. I have just read Authenticity, and both the abstract paintings by one of the central characters (stripes in pastel colours, compared by one critic in the book to 'the pale flags of imaginary countries') and the other main protagonist's  boxes with objects that can only be glimpsed through fluttering ribbons still linger in my mind.

(Inventing an artist's work in film, while not depending on words to capture it, poses the challenge of actually having to show it and be convincing, whether that means finding a real-life artist whose existing work will serve that purpose or commissioning something suitable. When I watched the 1998 version of Great Expectations as a teenager, I was moved by Finn's large-scale drawings.)

Indoors, outdoors

 

 

Indoors: In order to remember to do the exercises for my knees and some yoga and meditation every day, I now leave a pillow on the yoga mat as a visual reminder. I can see it from the main room (I leave all the doors open most of the time and my house is very small), so there is no way around it. I also need it for some of the exercises. When I am finished I put the pillow back on the spare bed. So far this works. Once I get used to the sight of the pillow on the floor, this may change.

I am rereading To the Lighthouse (while standing on one leg, for instance - this isn't just for the photo) and enjoyed the two introductions in this edition, particularly Eavan Boland's. "Perhaps most importantly, the lighthouse is at the service of the beautiful, insistent subjectivity which Mrs Ramsay turns on it in the first chapters, thereby including herself in the wider project of the book itself - diminishing a reality by uncovering a truth:..." (Woolf, Virginia: To the Lighthouse, Vintage, London 2004, p. xiv).

My early-morning-climbing-back-into-bed-for-half-an-hour* book is Toby Young's How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, a successful book about failure, to paraphrase Nicholas Lezard. It is very entertaining with hilarious glimpses into the vainglorious world of Condé Nast and helpful in my endeavour to be more carefree and worry less - there is something cathartic about reading Young's cringe-inducing account of his time in New York. I suffer from excessive Fremdschaemen (being embarrassed on behalf of someone else), so I am probably way too involved when reading this, but it may give me a thicker skin for my own awkward moments.

Outdoors: More growing and an explosion of colours, and the trees are finally in bloom, too, if somewhat tentatively. I have been given the go-ahead to try running again, starting with 15 minutes, three of which to be walked, but due to a chesty cough I haven't done it yet. But I have been going for walks and getting lots of sun whenever it is out.

*a new habit